There are some things that happen at Foreign Corrupt Practices Act conferences that are just silly.
For instance, the FCPA’s annual dog and pony show is occurring this week and at the conference Glenn Leon (Chief of the DOJ’s Fraud Section) stated: “I’ve now looked under the hood, I’m familiar with the pipeline, and I have every confidence that we’re quite busy in the FCPA space and working on important, impactful cases and will continue to do so.” (See here).
This is quite profound. The DOJ, which has a specific FCPA Unit, is working on FCPA cases.
That is like saying pilots are flying planes today, teachers are teaching, and surgeons are in surgery.
One of the matters in the pipeline concerns ABB (which as highlighted in this prior post is poised to become the FCPA’s first three-time offender). According to a recent Wall Street Journal article:
“ABB Ltd. is nearing a deal to pay around $325 million to resolve bribery allegations in South Africa, according to people familiar with the matter, an outcome that would make the Swiss industrial company a third-time violator of U.S. antibribery laws. The pending settlement between Zurich-based ABB and U.S., German, Swiss and South African authorities, which is expected to be finalized as soon as [this] week, would resolve corruption investigations into the company’s work on South Africa’s Kusile power plant, people familiar with the matter said. ABB in 2015 won a contract to provide the control and instrumentation system for the Kusile facility, which is run by Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned energy utility.”
With the calendar now showing December, set forth below is where core corporate FCPA enforcement actions currently stand compared to prior years.
- 2022 – 7 (Year to Date)
- 2021 – 4
- 2020 – 12
- 2019 – 14
- 2018 – 17
- 2017 – 13
- 2016 – 27
- 2015 – 11
- 2014 – 10
- 2013 – 9
- 2012 – 12
